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The Elephant in the Room

If a polling lead in the first week of September were a guarantee of victory two months later, then John McCain and Al Gore would have both been sworn in as president of the United States. So no, President Obama’s convention bounce has not – repeat, has not — sealed the election for the Democrats.

What the Obama bounce has done, though, is dramatically reduce the possibility that this election will turn out like 1980 or 1992, when the electorate broke hard against the incumbent in the last few months of the campaign. The convention period was Mitt Romney’s best chance to pull substantially ahead of the president and set himself up to pull away. If Romney wins, it will probably be by a whisker, not a lap.

Judging by the last week’s worth of conservative commentary, this post-convention reality – a narrower path to victory for Romney and a stronger likelihood of defeat – comes as a shock to many of his backers. Not that they expected an outright landslide, necessarily. But there’s a strong consensus on the right that we should be headed for a much more decisive repudiation of this administration than the current polls suggest is possible.

“If the Republican Party cannot win in this environment,” George Will told his fellow panelists on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, “it has to get out of politics and find another business.” He was echoed by the popular radio host Laura Ingraham: “If you can’t beat Barack Obama with this record,” she told her listeners, “then shut down the party.” Likewise the historian and prominent Romney backer Niall Ferguson, who told Newsweek’s readers that Obama’s robust poll numbers proved that “the law of political gravity has been suspended.”

In their quest to explain the president’s resilience, conservatives haven’t just done the obvious thing and piled all the blame on Romney himself. They’ve started reaching for structural explanations for Romney’s underperformance, from “the left-controlled education system that has profoundly shaped the Millennials” (in the words of National Review’s Stanley Kurtz) to liberalism’s success at making the “government economy” of “federal welfare benefits” seem more important than the real economy of job creation (to quote the influential conservative blogger John Hinderaker).

Like Kurtz and Hinderaker, I think there are very interesting conversations to be had about conservatism’s inherent disadvantages in a welfare-state society with a liberal-tilting cultural establishment. But before we lose ourselves in sociology and poli-sci, it’s worth looking yet again at the most obvious explanation for Republican underperformance: the recent presidency of George W. Bush.

Vincent Laforet/The New York TimesGeorge W. Bush was sworn into office for a second time on January 20, 2005.

Eight years ago this November, Bush was re-elected with 51 percent of the popular vote, and his party gained four seats in the Senate, bringing their majority to 55 seats. Despite the controversy surrounding the Iraq War, the Republican Party of 2004 still retained the reputation that it had gained during the Reagan boom and the successful winding-down of the cold war: A majority of Americans trusted Bush’s party to provide effective leadership abroad and to pursue broadly shared prosperity at home, and Karl Rove’s vision of an enduring Republican majority seemed viable, if not inevitable.

Four years later, the dream was dead, and the public’s trust on both fronts was all but exhausted. The mismanagement of the Iraq occupation, piled on top of the W.M.D. fiasco, cost Bush’s party its reputation for foreign policy competence, while the Bush boom, such as it was, delivered weaker returns to the middle class than either the Reagan or the Clinton expansion — and then the financial crisis undid even those meager gains.

Since Bush left office, conservatives have been willing to acknowledge his failures as a fiscal conservative and to promise more responsibility on deficits and debt. This has been a necessary and important shift, responsible both for the energy of the Tea Party in the 2010 midterm elections and for the current Republican ticket’s (relatively) brave proposals on entitlement reform.

But the shift toward fiscal rectitude is the easy part, in a sense, because it just involved calling conservatives back to their principles, without necessarily acknowledging the places where ideology might need to adapt itself to new realities. It’s made the Republicans more serious than they were in January of 2008, but it’s left the party’s post-Bush weaknesses on the economy and foreign policy conspicuously unaddressed.

A presidential nominee could have filled this breach with fresh rhetoric and creative policy, but Romney, compromised and uncourageous, hasn’t been the right man for that job. On economics, he’s shifted awkwardly between a message that focuses (sensibly) on the struggles of the middle and working classes and a much more conventional right-wing celebration of entrepreneurs and “job creators.” On national security, he’s campaigned as a by-the-numbers hawk, with barely a hint that hawkishness might have delivered America into difficulties during the last Republican administration.

With unemployment still over 8 percent, he may be able to win with this kind of uncreative message. But the economy is stagnant, not collapsing, which means he’s not going to win a big majority just by showing up.

To win the kind of victory that conservatives seem to think they should be winning, the Republican Party needs two things: a domestic agenda that offers more to hard-pressed families than just generic conservative rhetoric about the genius of capitalism and a foreign policy program that reflects the hard lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is the simple reality of presidential politics in 2012. Americans don’t want to give the White House back to the Republicans because they remember the Bush era all too well. If they continue to be disappointed at the polls, conservatives will eventually recognize this problem and grope toward some sort of solution. Until then, the fault for their party’s underperformance will lie not in the stars or the structure of our society but in their own stubborn selves.

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Weekly pieces by the Op-Ed columnists Charles Blow and Ross Douthat, as well as regular posts from contributing writers like Thomas B. Edsall and Timothy Egan. This is also the place for opinionated political thinkers from all over the United States to make their arguments about everything connected to the 2012 election. Yes, everything: the candidates, the states, the caucuses, the issues, the rules, the controversies, the primaries, the ads, the electorate, the present, the past and even the future.